Reproductive Technologies: Approaching the Moral Limits of Christian Ethics?

Several weeks ago, the Associated Press reported that Travis County probate judge, Guy Herman, ruled that a mother could harvest sperm from her dead son’s body. The mother, Marissa Evans, stated: “I want him to live on. I want to keep a piece of him.” Evans and her attorneys were attempting to save the sperm for a future surrogate pregnancy.

In many ways this type of story is becoming quite common; likewise, so are the moral complications that arise from it. Consider the story reported just a year ago regarding a doctor who donated his sperm to a gay couple. Even though it was over eighteen years ago, he is now being forced to pay child support. The reporter writes:

The donor was a married doctor at a Long Island hospital in the late 1980s when he donated his sperm to a female hospital resident who was trying to have a baby with her lesbian partner, the Post reported. Although the donor gave up all claims and rights to the child, he allowed his name to be put on the birth certificate.

For several years after the boy’s birth in 1989, the doctor sent the child gifts and money and cards signed “Dad” and had regular contact with the child, the Post reported. However, when the boy moved to Oregon with his mother and her partner in 1993, regular contact stopped. Since then, the man’s contact with the child consisted of seven phone calls and one brief meeting over the past 15 years.

A New York family court judge ruled last month that the man must now pay child support for the boy, now 18 and heading to college, the Post reported.

These reports remind us of the multiple moral and legal questions that arise from reproductive technologies. Indeed, writing in his The Ethics of Sex, Helmut Thielicke argued that artificial insemination is a “borderline” case that confronts the marriage relationship at the “extreme.” What is it about this type of reproductive technology that makes it “borderline” and “extreme” for Christians?

These reproductive practices, especially AID and surrogacy, have often been labeled extreme by Christian theologians because they separate procreation from marital conjugal relations. That is, rather than children being the offspring of a couple’s total love giving, they are seen as the product of a couple’s will. Although this may seem small on the surface, it reflects a deep theological understanding of the nature of humanity, namely that we are ‘begotten not made,’ as Oliver O’Donovan rightly argues in his book by the same title. By absolutely severing conjugal relations from reproduction, we have perhaps missed part of the meaning of love. Sex certainly represents more than just an act of the will; it is a passion that expresses our inner most desires. Meilaender argues that children are “God’s yes to such mutual self-giving.”

Leon Kass demonstrates best how our language regarding “making babies” exposes this moral deficiency in our thinking.

Ancient Israel, impressed with the phenomenon of transmission of life from father to son, used a word we translate as “begetting” or “siring.” The Greeks, impressed with the springing forth of new life in the cyclical processes of generation and decay, called it genesis, from a root meaning “to come into being.” . . . The premodern Christian English-speaking world, impressed with the world as given by a Creator, used the term “pro-creation.” We, impressed with the machine and the gross national product (our own work of creation), employ a metaphor of factory, “reproduction.”

Kass’s story beautifully and powerfully illustrates our culture’s thinking that children are the products of our will, not a “heritage from the Lord.” Consequently, reproductive technology of the type reported in Associated Press indeed is “extreme” and “borderline,” making evident our selfish desires rather than demonstrating our yearning to live for God’s glory.